The two most significant things that happened yesterday, IMO, were the arrests last night of the Columbia University students and Trump’s Time magazine interview, in which he pretty much explicitly promises to end democracy as we know it if he’s re-elected. For right now I want to address the students and the campus protests.
I confess I am very conflicted about the campus protests. As a veteran of a few Vietnam-era campus antiwar protests I can relate to how the students feel and am supportive of their rights to express themselves. On the other hand, since those long-ago days I have believed the antiwar movement was mostly counterproductive and did little to end the Vietnam War. Yes, there were protests, and the war eventually ended, but correlation is not causation.
I’ve said this before, but here it is again: The antiwar movement’s only real accomplishments, IMO, were the election of Richard Nixon and the re-election of Richard Nixon. The Vietnam War was never hugely popular in the U.S., I don’t believe, but for most of its duration the antiwar movement was even more unpopular than the war. And Richard Nixon made masterful use of the antiwar movement to deflect public criticism of his handling of the war. Without the excesses of the antiwar movement, it’s possible the bleeping war might have ended sooner.
And I think something similar is already beginning to happen with the campus demonstrations about Gaza. I hear people arguing about the demonstrations, not the cause. The cause is getting lost in the noise. And if the purpose of these demonstrations is to promote sympathy for the Palestinian people, they are failing badly.
There have been conflicting accounts about whether there really is raging antisemitism in the campus demonstrations, especially at Columbia. Columbia demonstrators have denied antisemitism and pointed out that they even had a Seder in their incampment a few days ago. It may be that most of the students who have been participating in the demonstrations on the Columbia campus sincerely do not hate Jews. But I’ve been in enough lefty demonstrations to know that there are always a few who, shall we say, don’t appreciate the importance of message discipline.
This is from a couple of days ago, but please do read A Few Thoughts on the Situation in Israel-Palestine and on the Campuses by Josh Marshall. I learned a lot from this.
To me it seems clear that non-students operating on the periphery of the campus have been responsible for the most egregious comments or incidents that almost no one would deny are anti-Semitic. There’s been some of that from students on campus, usually in heated instances when visibly Jewish students are in the proximity of protesters.
But to me these instances obscure a deeper issue. The groups which are spearheading most of these protests — specifically, Students for Justice in Palestine but also others — support the overthrow of the current Israeli state and the expulsion of at least some substantial percentage of the current Jewish Israeli population. This is sometimes talked about as though this is envisioned without people actually being killed at a mass scale or under the pretense that Jewish Israelis have other home countries they can relocate to. But that’s not how overthrowing a whole society works. These views are also embedded in the big chants and manifestos, which you can hear just by turning on your TV.
And a lot of the backstory the students embrace is clearly oversimplified and turned into a simple morality play about the innocent Palestinians and their oppression by the evil Israel. And as part of that, Hamas has been “valorized” as the champions of the Palestinians. But this is a gross misreading of recent history. It’s closer to the truth, IMO, to say that Netanyahu’s hard-right coalition and Hamas are just two sides of the same ugly coin. The black-and-white picture, if you insist on one, is not Israel versus Palestine but people who would allow peaceful co-existence versus people who won’t.
Oslo gets a bad name today. And perhaps that’s fair since it failed. And failure is a bad thing. But we shouldn’t ignore the irony that we have spent the last six months in the grip of Hamas and Benjamin Netanyahu. And if you look back at the period from 1993 to 1996, there are two players who destroyed Oslo, as a matter of strategy and design. Netanyahu and Hamas. They both saw it as in their interests to kill it and they did kill it. You can question the good faith of the key actors of both sides of Oslo. But those two are the ones who set out to kill it and did kill it. They have always been, in effect, allies.
Exactly. And it’s also been pretty obvious to most of the world that what’s needed is a two-state solution, not the elimination of one state for the benefit of the other.
Michael Powell writes in The Atlantic that the Columbia students who tried to occupy Hamilton Hall, and were removed by NYPD, had backed themselves into a corner. They had no clear leader and no clear message, other than anti-zionism. When given opportunities to speak to news media, they did not.
Yesterday in front of Hamilton Hall—which protesters had renamed Hind’s Hall in honor of a 6-year-old girl who had been killed in Gaza—organizers of the Columbia demonstration called a press conference. But when reporters stepped forward to ask questions, they were met with stony stares and silence. At the liberated tent zone, minders—some of whom were sympathetic faculty members—kept out those seen as insufficiently sympathetic, and outright blocked reporters for Israeli outlets and Fox News.
The students’ chants were calling for the elimination of Israel and the restoration of all lands to the Palestinians. This goes even further than the position of the Palestinian Authority, which wants to work toward a two-state solution.
By 11 p.m., much of the work was done. The police had cleared Hamilton Hall and carted off protesters for booking. At 113th Street and Broadway, a mass of protesters, whose shouts echoed in the night, and a group of about 30 police officers peered at each other across metal barriers. One female protester harangued the cops—at least half of whom appeared to be Black, Asian American, or Latino—by likening them to the Ku Klux Klan. Then the chants fired up again. “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” There was a pause, as if the protesters were searching for something more cutting. “Hey hey, ho ho, Zionism has got to go.”
These are clueless young people drunk on self-righteousness. I’m not saying that of all the student demonstrators around the nation, but the would-be Hamilton Hall occupiers are not helping anybody, especially not Palestinians. But nobody’s behaved well here. From a distance, it looks like Columbia University officials also have made one mistake after another. At least the NYPD didn’t kill or maim anybody, which they might have in earlier times.
I’m seeing that violence broke out on the UCLA campus overnight, also. As with other campus protests, the UCLA students want their university to stop doing business with Israel. In some cases they want the university to stop doing business with corporations that do business in Israel, and with organizations with any ties whatsoever to Israel. I don’t know how many degrees of separation it would take to condemn everyone on the planet, including the protesters, of association with zionism, but I doubt very many.